Develop Reference

XML parser in BeautifulSoup only scrapes the first symbol out of two

I wish to read symbols from some XML content stored in a text file. When I use xml as a parser, I get the first symbol only. However, I got the two symbols when I use the xml parser. Here is the xml content.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<lookupdata symbolstring="WDS">
<key>
<symbol>WDS</symbol>
<exchange>NYE</exchange>
<openfigi>BBG001S5WCY6</openfigi>
<qmidentifier>USI79Z473117AAG</qmidentifier>
</key>
<equityinfo>
<longname>
Woodside Energy Group Limited American Depositary Shares each representing one
</longname>
<shortname>Woodside Energy </shortname>
2
<instrumenttype>equity</instrumenttype>
<sectype>DR</sectype>
<isocfi>EDSXFR</isocfi>
<issuetype>AD</issuetype>
<proprietaryquoteeligible>false</proprietaryquoteeligible>
</equityinfo>
</lookupdata>
<lookupdata symbolstring="PAM">
<key>
<symbol>PAM</symbol>
<exchange>NYE</exchange>
<openfigi>BBG001T5K0S1</openfigi>
<qmidentifier>USI68Z3Z75887AS</qmidentifier>
</key>
<equityinfo>
<longname>Pampa Energia S.A.</longname>
<shortname>PAM</shortname>
<instrumenttype>equity</instrumenttype>
<sectype>DR</sectype>
<isocfi>EDSXFR</isocfi>
<issuetype>AD</issuetype>
</equityinfo>
</lookupdata>
When I read the xml content from a text file and parse the symbols, I get only the first symbol.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open("input_xml.txt") as infile:
item = infile.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(item,"xml")
for item in soup.select("lookupdata symbol"):
print(item.text)
current output:
WDS
If I replace xml with lxml in BeautifulSoup(item,"xml"), I get both symbols. When I use lxml, a warning pops up, though.
As the content is xml, I would like to stick to xml parser instead of lxml.
Expected output:
WDS
PAM

The issue seems to be that the builtin xml library only loads the first item, it just stops after the first lookupdata ends. Given all the examples in the xml docs have some top-level container element, I'm assuming it just stops parsing after the first top-level element ends (though am not sure, just an assumption). You can add a print(soup) after you load it in to see what its using.
You could use BeautifulSoup(item, "html.parser") which uses the builtin html library, which works.
Or, to keep using the xml library, surround it with some top-level dummy element, like:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open("input_xml.txt") as infile:
item = infile.read()
patched = f"<root>{item}</root>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(patched, "xml")
for found in soup.select("lookupdata symbol"):
print(found.text)
Output:
WDS
PAM

how to properly extract utf8 text (japanese symbols) from a webpage with BeautifulSoup4

i downloaded webpages using wget. now i am trying to extract some data i need from those pages. the problem is with the Japanese words contained in this data. the English words extraction was perfect.
when i try to extract the Japanese words and use them in another app they appear gibberish. during testing diffrent methods there was one solution that fixed only half the japanese words.
what i tried: i tried
from_encoding="utf-8"
which had no effect. also i tried multiple ways to extract the text from the html code like
section.get_text(strip=True)
section.text.strip()
and others, also i tried to encode the generated text using URLencoding which did not work, also i tried using every code i could find on stackoverflow
one of the methods that strangely worked (but not completely) was saving the string in a dictionary then saving it into a JSON then calling the JSON from ANOTHER script. just using the dictionary, as it is, would not work. i have to use JSON as a middle man between two scripts. strange. (not all the words worked)
my question may seem like duplicates of anther question. but that other question is scraping from the internet. and what i am trying to do is extract from an offline source.
here is a simple script explaining the main problem
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
page = BeautifulSoup(open("page1.html"), 'html.parser', from_encoding="utf-8")
word = page.find('span', {'class' : "radical-icon"})
wordtxt = word.get_text(strip=True)
#then save the word to a file
with open("text.txt", "w", encoding="utf8") as text_file:
text_file.write(wordtxt)
when i open the file i get gibberish characters
here is the part of the html that BeautifulSoup searchs:
<span class="radical-icon" lang="ja">亠</span>
the expected results is to get the symbols inside the text file. or to save them properly in anyway.
is there a better web scraper to use to properly get the utf8?
PS: sorry for bad english

i think i found an answer, just uninstall beautifulsoup4. i dont need it.
python has a builtin way to search for strings, i tried something like this:
import codecs
import re
with codecs.open("page1.html", 'r', 'utf-8') as myfile:
for line in myfile:
if line.find('<span class="radical-icon"') > -1:
result = re.search('<span class="radical-icon" lang="ja">(.*)</span>', line)
s = result.group(1)
with codecs.open("text.txt", 'w', 'utf-8') as textfile:
textfile.write(s)
which is the over complicated and non-pythonic way of doing it. but what works works.

Output simple text from HTML using Python/BeautifulSoup

I am building a Python function to input HTML email content and output simple text with very little formatting, but including line breaks for readability. The output is to be posted to a Slack channel.
Currently I am taking in the input text, unescaping (using HTMLParser.HTMLParser.unescape since this is in Python 2.7) and then cleaning using BeautifulSoup.gettext(). This outputs clean text, but since the output has been stripped of all formatting, the result is almost unreadable.
How can I force BeautifulSoup to include only newlines but strip all else?
My current code is as follows:
from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
def textify(raw_html):
parser = HTMLParser()
unescaped_html = parser.unescape(raw_html)
soup = BeautifulSoup(unescaped_html)
# get text
text = soup.getText()
return text

Create new list from old using re.sub() in python 2.7

My goal is to take an XML file, pull out all instances of a specific element, remove the XML tags, then work on the remaining text.
I started with this, which works to remove the XML tags, but only from the entire XML file:
from urllib import urlopen
import re
url = [URL of XML FILE HERE] #the url of the file to search
raw = urlopen(url).read() #open the file and read it into variable
exp = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
text_only = exp.sub('',raw).strip()
I've also got this, text2 = soup.find_all('quoted-block'), which creates a list of all the quoted-block elements (yes, I know I need to import BeautifulSoup).
But I can't figure out how to apply the regex to the list resulting from the soup.find_all. I've tried to use text_only = [item for item in text2 if exp.sub('',item).strip()] and variations but I keep getting this error: TypeError: expected string or buffer
What am I doing wrong?

You don't want to regex this. Instead just use BeautifulSoup's existing support for grabbing text:
quoted_blocks = soup.find_all('quoted-block')
text_chunks = [block.get_text() for block in quoted_blocks]

How to read an entire web page into a variable

I am trying to read an entire web page and assign it to a variable, but am having trouble doing that. The variable seems to only be able to hold the first 512 or so lines of the page source.
I tried using readlines() to just print all lines of the source to the screen, and that gave me the source in its entirety, but I need to be able to parse it with regex, so I need to store it in a variable somehow. Help?
data = urllib2.urlopen(url)
print data
Only gives me about 1/3 of the source.
data = urllib2.urlopen(url)
for lines in data.readlines()
print lines
This gives me the entire source.
Like I said, I need to be able to parse the string with regex, but the part I need isn't in the first 1/3 I'm able to store in my variable.

You probably are looking for beautiful soup: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ It's an open source web parsing library for python. Best of luck!

You should be able to use file.read() to read the entire file into a string. That will give you the entire source. Something like
data = urllib2.urlopen(url)
print data.read()
should give you the entire webpage.
From there, don't parse HTML with regex (well-worn post to this effect here), but use a dedicated HTML parser instead. Alternatively, clean up the HTML and convert it to XHTML (for instance with HTML Tidy), and then use an XML parsing library like the standard ElementTree. Which approach is best depends on your application.

Actually, print data should not give you any html content because its just a file pointer. Official documentation https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib2.html:
This function returns a file-like object
This is what I got :
print data
<addinfourl at 140131449328200 whose fp = <socket._fileobject object at 0x7f72e547fc50>>
readlines() returns list of lines of html source and you can store it in a string like :
import urllib2
data = urllib2.urlopen(url)
l = []
s = ''
for line in data.readlines():
l.append(line)
s = '\n'.join(l)
You can either use list l or string s, according to your need.

I would also recommend to use opensource web parsing libraries for easy work rather than using regex for complete HTML parsing, any way u need regex for url parsing.

If you want to parse over the variable afterwards you might use gazpacho:
from gazpacho import Soup
url = "https://www.example.com"
soup = Soup.get(url)
str(soup)
That way you can perform finds to extract the information you're after!